Israel: a contemporary ghetto

The wall (see map) that will soon enclose 40% of the West Bank is meant to decide the future of the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel on the ground. But the enclosures will be fragmentary, and access to and from them completely controlled by Israel, which no longer even needs the Palestinians as a cheap and convenient labour resource.

THE Quartet - the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia - expressed alarm, when they met on 22 June in Jordan, at the assass inations of Hamas leaders by the Israeli army. Such provocation is a hindrance to any truce with Palestinian groups and to implementation of the “road map”. But a look at the physical progress of the wall that will soon enclose 40% of the West Bank tells us what kind of Palestinian state Ariel Sharon has in mind.

Work on the wall started in April 2002, but the Palestinians’ protests did not attract international attention at the time (1). The idea for the barrier originally came from the Labour party. It was intended to prevent attacks on Israeli civilians inside the Green Line (defining Israel’s borders before the 1967 war). The nationalist right was hostile to the plan, seeing it as the outline of a future border between Israel and Palestine.

But no one then perceived the difference between a border regulating peaceful exchanges between two independent states and a barrier surrounding the colonised but guaranteeing complete freedom of access to the coloniser. After all, prisons have walls. And the wall that has encircled the entire Gaza Strip since the 1990s has not prevented the Israeli army from operating there, or breaking the territory into small enclaves (2).

The scale of the West Bank construction demonstrates that this is not just a security fence. At several points the barrier is 60-70 metres wide or more. Behind barbed wire is a ditch and then the 8-metre-high wall, equipped with an electronic alarm system; beyond that is an unpaved path, a paved road and then more barbed wire. The area between the wall and the Green Line will be declared a “closed military zone” and, on the Palestinian side, there will be other forbidden areas, accessible only through checkpoints.

It is a vast undertaking. Even without counting the eastern part, the wall will cost $1.4bn. The northern side, which should (...)